“His lordship has broken his fast and called for a carriage,” her lady’s maid informed her, holding up the dressing gown for Callie to don.
Callie swallowed down a rush of disappointment at Whitmore’s announcement. He was going somewhere? Already? Where? Why?
Then she reminded herself she did not care where he went. At least if he was gone, she would not have to worry about the manner in which she conducted herself.
“Very well,” she said, still clutching the bedclothes to her chest as she sidled to the end of the mattress. “I suppose I will take breakfast below.”
She could hardly consider the countess’s apartments hers. And she was not about to break her fast in a faded chamber haunted by the ghosts of her husband’s past.
Somehow, she had forgotten just how high Sin’s bed was. But she remembered now, as she dangled her legs over the edge. She felt like a child, her bare feet swinging through the air, nowhere near touching the threadbare carpets below.
How humiliating.
“Would you care for a hand, my lady?” Whitmore asked calmly.
“What I would like is a stool,” she grumbled, “or a stair. This bed is insufferably high.”
“Yes, my lady. Of course.” Whitmore’s expression did not change. “I will see about finding one for you.”
“Blast,” Callie grumbled before throwing herself off the bed. She landed with a dull thud on her two feet and stuffed her arms into the dressing gown, hauling it around herself as if it were a protective shield. “Thank you, Whitmore. You are a gem, as always. Does breakfast promise to be as wretched an affair as dinner was last night?”
Whitmore rolled her lips inward. “I fear so, my lady.”
Callie sighed. “Is the situation below stairs as dire as I suspect?”
Her lady’s maid did not answer. She did not need to—her expression said it all.
“Very well, Whitmore,” she said. “I suppose we are not at Westmorland House any longer, are we?”
“No, my lady. We are not indeed,” agreed her lady’s maid, her tone stoic.
The day loomed before her, endless as the rest of her life.
How in Hades was she going to navigate these treacherous waters?
“You look like you need a whisky.”
Sin threw himself into a chair and glared at his old friend. “Go to hell, Decker. It is not even yet noon.”
“And the morning after your wedding,” Decker agreed, placing a crystal glass filled with amber liquid on the low Louis Quinze table at his side. “What the devil are you doing paying me a call? Should you not be ballocks deep in quim at the moment?”
Mr. Elijah Decker was not the sort of man who minced words.
Sin scowled. “You are speaking of my lady wife.”
Decker seated himself in the chair alongside Sin’s in his extravagant library. “A lady who did her best to ruin you. You could have avoided all this if you had accepted my offer.”
Sin exhaled. He had confided in Decker about all his woes. His friend had, of course, suggested he loan Sin enough funds to settle his debts, but Sin had refused. He could not bear to accept Decker’s charity, knowing there was a chance he could never repay him.
Sin considered Decker the brother he had never had. Neither of them truly belonged in their worlds. Decker was the bastard son of the Earl of Graham, and Graham had bequeathed him everything he could aside from his title. He had wealth but not respectability and had used that wealth to amass a business empire. Sin, meanwhile, had a title without wealth. And now, he did not even possess respectability.
There was always the hope, however, that his marriage to Lady Calliope could alter that, in time. If he even gave a damn about such a thing, and he was sure he did not. All he wanted was enough funds to keep his mother comfortably ensconced.
He took the whisky and sipped it slowly. Like everything else Decker collected, it was very fine. The library, laden with curiosities—most of them lewd in nature—was a testament to his wealth, travels, and taste for the subversive.
“Your silence is telling, old friend,” Decker observed, his tone pointed. Knowing.
Too knowing, blast him.
“You know I cannot accept a farthing from you and maintain even a modicum of my self-respect.” He cast a glance in his friend’s direction. “And why should I want to bed a woman who is my nemesis?”
“Why indeed?” Decker raised a brow.
Fuck. Sin was torn this morning. Last night had been…